Indian Women In Sports: Wikipedia Edita-a-thon

We are all aware of the large reach and popularity of Wikipedia. However, what most people don’t know is that, according to a studyconducted in 2011, only 9% of the editors at Wikipedia were women. And the percentage for India is even lower, just 3%.

Wikipedia recognises the systemic gender bias that is created because of factors such as these and thus enables its diverse range of users to edit and create Wikipedia pages, with reliable and authentic sources.

Feminism in India conducts regular Wikipedia edit-a-thons with different partners exploring various facets of gender in India, thus increasing content on women and marginalized communities on Wikipedia as well as training women to create and edit Wikipedia pages and hence increasing the number of women editors.

This month we held an edit-a-thon on Indian Women In Sports: Wikipedia Edita-a-thonat our New Delhi office. The edit-a-thon was aimed at creating/editing Wikipedia pages of Indian women in sports who lack representation on the platform currently.

Accordingly, we created a list of Indian women in sports and looked at their representation on Wikipedia. Most of the names had a page on Wikipedia, but with very basic and limited information (stub pages).

We were a group of 6 participants in total. The event began with a discussion on the whys and hows of Wikipedia editing for new-comers.

After that, each participant chose one or more Indian sports woman absent from Wikipedia, and started digging through the internet looking for interviews, news reports and e-books that mentioned their chosen sportswomen to write comprehensive Wikipedia articles on them.

By the end of the day, the participants had edited a total of about 11 Wikipedia pages in English.

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Feminism in India is an award-winning digital intersectional feminist platform to learn, educate and develop a feminist consciousness among the youth. It is required to unravel the F-word and demystify all the negativity surrounding it. FII amplifies the voices of women and marginalized communities using tools of art, media, culture, technology and community.